SEATTLE — On a busy stretch of road in this city’s Ballard neighborhood, a curious new grocery store is taking shape — and so begins another effort by Amazon to use the residents of its hometown as guinea pigs.
Workers are finishing up a driveway with a series of parking stalls, protected from the rain by a soaring steel canopy. When the store opens, customers will buy their items online, schedule a time slot to pick them up and pull into the stalls, where employees will whisk orders to their cars, according to documents filed with the city’s planning department.
Across town in the SoDo neighborhood, another Amazon drive-up grocery store is under construction. Late last year, Amazon began testing a new convenience-store concept in Seattle, Amazon Go, that uses sensors and other technology so shoppers can check out without having to visit a cashier. And in late 2015, it opened its first physical bookstore in a shopping mall in north Seattle, before expanding to more than a half-dozen other locations around the country.